The South Atlantic Quarterly

Makdisi, Saree.
The Israel Divestment Campaign and the Question of Palestine in America
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 102, Number 4, Fall 2003, pp. 877-894

Duke University Press

Saree Makdisi - The Israel Divestment Campaign and the Question of Palestine in America - The South Atlantic Quarterly 102:4 The South Atlantic Quarterly 102.4 (2003) 877-894 The Israel Divestment Campaign and the Question of Palestine in America Saree Makdisi Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent," warned Harvard President Lawrence Summers at a morning prayer meeting one day last September. "But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities." Summers's examples of supposedly anti-Semitic activities on university campuses include the call for an academic boycott of Israel (initiated by a letter to the Guardian from two Jewish academics in London), and, closer to home, the nascent campaign on American university campuses -- modeled on the successful antiapartheid campaigns of the 1980s -- calling for divestment from Israel until it implements UN Security Council resolutions (some of which it has been ignoring for more than fifty years) and adheres to the standards of international humanitarian law as codified, for example, in the Fourth Geneva Convention (which Israel has been violating on a daily basis since its 1967 conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It is in...